Checkpoint buys SNORT!

[phishphreek]

October 6, 2005

To the Snort community:

I am very excited to announce that Check Point has signed an agreement to acquire Sourcefire, the company that develops the Snort® project and maintains the snort.org domain. I know that many of you are probably going to ask “what does this mean for Snort?”, so I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about that.

I’ll start by stating again what I’ve stated in the past, Snort is now and will continue to be free to end-users. We will continue to develop and distribute the Snort engine under the GPL, improve and document the program to stay on the cutting edge and expand the snort.org web site. The community continues, as always, to be important to us as a group of people who use the code pervasively throughout the entire Internet, report on problems and make suggestions and contributions to the project. Check Point is very excited about continuing Sourcefire’s involvement with the open source community!

I’d also like to take a moment to extend a personal “thank you” to the Snort community for your contribution to Sourcefire’s success. Little did I know when I first decided to GPL and release Snort in 1998 that it would become the foundation of this worldwide community of hundreds of thousands of users and the core technology of Sourcefire at its founding, and now the launching point for an acquisition by one of the largest and most respected security companies in the world. All of us at Sourcefire look forward to taking our vision and technology to the next level as a vital part of a true industry leader and continuing to build the best open source intrusion detection and prevention technology in the world.

The acquisition is subject to regulatory conditions and approvals and is expected to close by Q106. You can review the press release and FAQ documents at http://www.checkpoint.com/sourcefire.

Sincerely,

Martin Roesch
Founder and CTO
Sourcefire, Inc.

http://www.snort.org/about_snort/msg...mr_100605.html

http://www.checkpoint.com/sourcefire/

[warl0ck7]

Greate news, finally SNORT is getting what it deserves.

[zencoder]

Right-o! Hopefully they don't f$ck it all up. They haven't seemed to have done that with ZoneLabs (yet), so maybe there's hope...


/* edit: more to say... */

And let's hope that CP does not try to implement their "version numbering" travesty on Snort.

Snort IDS-1 w/DPI fp49 X (build 528, HFA3)
(Deep packet inspection, for those that were curious)

That is the worst friggin scheme I've ever seen. Somebody at Check Point needs a slap in the head with a brick for choosing that format for their version numbering.

[Opus00]

Marty Roesch is the one that has been keeping it in the open source community and since Checkpoint is totally commercial and paid $225 million for it, how long will it be before they close it. Look at RedHat and other flavors of Linux and now Nessus too.

They do say that they will keep it open source but I am wondering how long will it take for some number cruncher or new CEO or other officer convinces them otherwise.

Everyone who uses snort knows when sourcefire was created we were told nothing was going to change the open source part of snort. Since then though, the signature part did change and to get the super duper version of snort sigs you have to subscribe/pay for them. Grant it we can write and do our own sigs, but losing the community effort would be a great loss. I don't blame them for trying to make money, it is how they stay alive. I've just been using snort for so long, I'll hate it when it will no longer be freely available.

I'm just biding the time until it happens, hopefully, when and if it does occur, the open community can take the last GPL version and fork it to another open source IDS project.

[Relyt]

Well they also acquired Zone Alarm awhile ago. With the firewalls (FW1 & ZA) and Snort, the only thing missing would be NMAP. Is that next on their hit list

cheers

[zencoder]

Originally posted here by Relyt
Well they also acquired Zone Alarm awhile ago. With the firewalls (FW1 & ZA) and Snort, the only thing missing would be NMAP. Is that next on their hit list

cheers

Hasn't Fyodor turned down an offer or two for NMAP? I know it's used at the heart of SEVERAL commercial VA tools and scanners...and the way it feeds right into Nessus, I'm sure it's a tasty morsel for SOMEONE to snap up.

[apreasher]

Don't worry . Even if they buy all the good open sources in this world and make them to be commercial. There surely will be other newly born open sources again.

And then the cycle repeats itself again and again.

[kcore]

Snort will not be closed. It will continue to remain open throughout the life of the product. If Snort is ever closed. It then ceases to become Snort. Marty wouldn't let it close. Trust me.